Microsoft Teams has announced new solutions for retail workers to simplify operations and enhance customer experiences.
The latest products and features include updates to team communication and collaboration, retail store operations, and business management.
The innovations will be showcased at the annual National Retail Federation (NRF), which takes place between January 14–16.
Team Communication and Collaboration
Microsoft has released the capability to route announcements to frontline teams based on their location, department, and job role. This feature will be generally available in March this year.
Frontline teamwork has been bolstered through the addition of auto-generated roles and department tagging, making it easier to pass information to the right person at the right time. Tags can be configured for frontline workers via the Teams Admin Center when it enters public preview in February 2024.
Answers from Q&A conversations in Viva Engage within Teams are available in communities as of this month, enabling frontline workers to more easily obtain the information they need.
From February 2024, employee engagement can be monitored to see the impact it has on business performance. Adding network analytics to Viva Engage in Teams will provide AI-powered theme extraction and employee retention metrics to improve insights into workforce dynamics and lead to more informed decision-making.
Teams’ Walkie Talkie users will have the option to automatically listen to incoming transmissions from their pinned Teams channels, allowing them to be better informed without needing to switch between channels. This feature will be generally available by the end of this month.
Frontline workers can now use any generic wired headset for instant team communication on Android devices, so long as the headsets have a control button to play, pause, accept, and decline calls. This cost-saving feature will be generally available from February 2024.
Retail Store Operations
New features for frontline team workers include the ability to set shift availability based on specific dates, which will enable them greater freedom to manage their individual schedules. It will become available to teams this month.
Currently, in public preview and due to be generally available in March 2024, admins will be able to deploy shifts at scale for their teams through the Teams Admin Centre. Admins are also gaining the ability to identify schedule owners and create uniform scheduling groups and time-off reasons that will be the same for all frontline teams.
Frontline teams can be deployed at scale for the entire workforce via the Teams Admin Center. Team membership can be automatically managed and kept up to date as workers begin, switch roles, and leave organizations. Gaining availability in February this year, custom user attributes in Entra ID will enable admins to define frontline and location information, as well as the addition of a people picker within the setup wizard to ease the team owner designation process.
This month, admins gain the ability to map operational hierarchy to have a clearer view of their organization’s structure, which includes frontline locations and teams.
Generative AI can be used to streamline in-store shift management from February 2024. A new Shifts plugin for Microsoft 365 Copilot will allow managers to find open shifts, time off, and existing shifts. Copilot uses data from the Shift app to ground prompts and retrieve insights for frontline managers.
Using task publishing, you can now add a list of tasks to be automatically published to frontline teams at regular intervals, which will benefit managers needing to publish regular tasks like store opening and closing times, inspections, and compliance checks. This feature will become generally available in March 2024.
From March 2024, managers can create tasks that all team members must complete, such as training or reviewing a new policy.
The task publishing feature is also gaining the option for managers to request forms and photo completion, which recipients will not be able to mark as complete until their form has been submitted. This has the positive side effect of increasing accountability for important tasks for both frontline managers and their teams.
Business Management
A simplified authentication process using a domain-less sign-in has been added to save time by removing the need for workers to type out long user names.
Teams will now be able to sign in using only the first part of their user name, excluding the domain ending, as well as the password, to gain access to Teams on shared and corporate-managed devices.
